RSS changes to incorporate Feedburner

[mwmconsulting]

Greetings SMFers,

Many of you have already heard of Feedburner, and might already be using it.  For those of you new to Feedburner, it basically allows you to monitor the number of subscribers to your RSS feeds.  More can be learned on the Feedburner website: http://www.feedburner.com.

Incorporating Feedburner into your SMF is pretty simple, so I'd like to share with you how it's done.

1) You'll, of course, first need to enable RSS on your SMF by logging in as the Admin, and then going to Admin -> News and newsletters -> Settings.

2) You'll also want to add the RSS Feed Icon mod graciously provided by vbgamer45.  It can be found here: http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=376

3) After RSS is enabled and the RSS Feed Icon mod installed, you'll see the little orange RSS icons next to each board on your forum.  Now, to incorporate Feedburner into those little icons you'll need to edit the /Themes/default/BoardIndex.template.php file.

On line 146 you'll see this:

Code Select Expand

<b><a href="', $board['href'], '" name="b', $board['id'], '">', $board['name'], '</a></b>&nbsp;<a href="' . $scripturl . '?action=.xml;board=' . $board['id'] . ';type=rss"><img src="' . $settings['images_url'] . '/rss.png" alt="rss" /></a><br />

You'll want to change that to this:

Code Select Expand

<b><a href="', $board['href'], '" name="b', $board['id'], '">', $board['name'], '</a></b>&nbsp;<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/XXXXX-' . $board['id'] . '" target="_blank"><img src="' . $settings['images_url'] . '/rss.png" alt="rss" /></a><br />

Where XXXXX is an abbreviation for your site that will be used when setting up the Feedburner feed.

4) Now you can log into your Feedburner account (or create one if you're new), and set up your feed.  Once your feed is created, you'll need to edit the feed details.  You'll see the Feed Address that will start with this http://feeds.feedburner.com/ with an input box following.  In the input box you'll want to put XXXXX-## where XXXXX is the same as above and ## is the number of the board from your site.  You can get the number simply by looking at the original SMF RSS feed and locating it.

There ya go.  As easy as that.  This should probably be incorporated into a Mod of some sort, which I will attempt to do when I find time.

Good luck!

- MWM

[calliopy]

Does this mean burning a separate feed for each board ID?  How is this applied to the mod?

[青山 素子]

Based on the description, yes, it would require configuring a new feed for each board and also each type of feed (news, etc).

[Dzonny]

This is cool...
Thanks....

[equalityformen.org]

Thank you mwmconsulting,

Your changes worked perfectly. One thing I don't understand is, why do i need to have a feed for each board? It seems that if I view any particular board feed all of the new topics from all of the boards are visible.

Do I really need more than 1 feed for the whole site?

Thanks,
[email protected]
hxxp:equalityformen.org [nonactive]
hxxp:forum.equalityformen.org [nonactive]

[bjraines]

I am looking over your instructions above. Feedburner will not validate my SMF feeds

[Arantor]

What URL are you giving Feedburner for the feeds?

[bjraines]

http://www.mychemistrytutor.com/forums/index.php?action=.xml;sa=news;limit=2

I get this error

his feed does not validate.

    *

      line 2, column 0: Undefined root element: xml-feed [help]

[青山 素子]

Try adding type=rss, type=rss2, or type=atom to that URL. That specifies which feed type you want. The default is plain XML otherwise.

[bjraines]

awesome that worked perfect!

[Sicarius]

What code i need to show RSS feeds from the forum on my another or another site?
Like here[the feedburner in forum news board]:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fempirumonline.com%2Ft4%2F&sl=iw&tl=en [nofollow]

[Kindred]

You would need an incoming RSS feed parser. That is not something standard in SMF.

[Sicarius]

So i will need to build a code to show feeds from my SMF forum? Is there no other way to do something?

[Kindred]

there are lots of ways....   but smf, by default does not import or display rss feeds from elsewhere...     

If you want to display an RSS feed, you will have to find the code to do so (there are lots of code snips to do it... i.e. EZPortal has a feed display module)

[Arantor]

Or even the RSS Feed Poster mod.